EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: The plastikstufe and connect sums of contact manifolds
Speaker: Emmy Murphy
Speaker Info: MIT
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

Abstract: The goal of the talk will be to apply the flexible Weinstein h-cobordism theorem to show that many distinct contact manifolds become contactomorphic after connect summing with a certain "destructive" contact manifold. We'll start by defining Weinstein manifolds (a particularly nice type of symplectic manifolds), and discussing how they interplay with contact manifolds. We then define flexible Weinstein manifolds, and discuss how they can be used to prove contact manifolds are contactomorphic. Finally, we define the plastikstufe, and show why it turns non-flexible Weinsteins into flexible ones. This project is joint work with Niederkruger, Plamenevskaya, and Stipsicz.